SESSION: Feminist Art History Now (FULL DAY SESSION – PART 2)

This panel invited contributions that sought to evaluate, critique and imagine feminist art history in the present moment, when noticeable gains in the representation of women artists – as well as other underrepresented constituencies – coincide with a growing tide of hostile gender politics, racism, colonial entitlement, ableism and homophobia. What characterises a feminist politics within and against Art History when, for instance, foundational understandings of gender recognition are contested in legal battles in the UK Supreme Court, encouraging hatred and violence against trans women? Or, how might feminist art histories of transnational solidarity be expressed against the political rhetoric that positions the UK as an ‘island of strangers’?

While resistant to the novelty of ‘newness’ and alive to continuities with longstanding feminist art-historical methods and approaches, we invited papers that address contemporary conceptual challenges with reference to the art and visual culture of any period or region. We aim to consider intersectionality in feminist art history; the relationship between trans studies and feminism; new models for understanding feminist relationality; or the practice of feminist art history in relation to activism, archives, publishing, exhibition-making, collecting, consciousness-raising, or pedagogy. Speakers will reflect on recent work and longstanding projects, as well as engage in speculative papers or ideas in formation.

Ultimately, this panel asks, where is Feminist Art History Now? What are its tools, and coalitions, its limits and affordances?

Session Convenors:

Amy Tobin, University of Cambridge

Part 2 Session Speakers:

Danae Filioti, University College London

Sounding it: Rita Donagh’s Reflection on Three Weeks in May 1970

In 1846, Henri David Thoreau took to measuring Walden Pond with ‘compass, chain and sounding line.’ Much later this simple outline, learned from Thoreau’s texts on civil disobedience and transcendentalism, ‘…or Life in the Woods’, was replicated by Rita Donagh in her diagrammatic painting Reflection on Three Weeks in May 1970 (1971). There, it is situated with an assortment of marks, against a gridded base. It bookends a rosy and amorphous marking that denotes a bloodstain from the Ohio National Guards’ shooting of students protesting at Kent State that year. Others are coded references to a performative classroom environment from the University of Reading

In this paper, I consider the implications of objectivity and measure for feminism now. The principle of objective measurement has been discredited in the arts at least since its recognition as an agent of industrialisation, or Taylorism. Could Donagh’s
quotation yet be seen to diverge from this perspective? I propose to consider her retracement with an eye to a larger discourse on the sampling of lived experience and its measure.

Link to image:
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/donagh-reflection-on-three-weeks-in-may-1970-t01687

Rahila Haque, Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts, London

Description is not liberation: black and anti-imperial feminisms against representation

This paper aims to articulate black and anti-imperial feminist elsewheres to art history’s imperial framing of Black British Art as a thing of the past. Historicised as ‘the critical decade’ of the 1980s, during which a generation of black and brown artists living in Britain became active, Black British Art’s ensuing narrative and institutional inclusion have come to embody a calcification and liberal sanitisation of the radical political demands that precipitated these artists’ interventions.

Moving across the different disciplinary frameworks of feminist art history, black aesthetics, cultural studies and black studies, I situate artists’ works in their place within networks of international feminist thought and praxis. I consider feminist methodologies that surface relational and interruptive narratives, rooted in anti-imperial and coalitional aesthetics. Drawing on Katherine McKittrick’s conception of a black methodology, I borrow the formulation ‘description is not liberation’ as the problem of liberal representation, and explore methods that resist formal reductionism and the separation of artworks from their politics as black and anti-imperial feminist interventions within the violent structural reality of Britain’s neocolonial present.

Evelyn Whorall-Campbell, University of Edinburgh

Feminist Art History After Trans Studies

Feminism and trans have struggled to reconcile their political projects, both organised around theories of gender which undermine the other. At its most brutalising, feminism has sought to eradicate trans as subjectivity and epistemology, mobilising ‘gender-critical’ rhetoric to stabilise white womanhood. Trans studies have critiqued feminism’s trans-exclusion whilst articulating the potential for political alliance, defining a trans-feminist project equipped to think the asymmetries of gendered embodiment within punitive norms. In Art History, feminist and trans approaches largely remain discontinuous: this paper brings recent trans scholarship to bear upon the field to delineate what Feminist Art History after Trans Studies might become.

Feminist Art History after Trans Studies rejects the progressive narrative of inclusion, which positions transness as a late addition to feminism. Instead, this paper presents the historic co-constitution of feminist and trans epistemologies through analysing a ‘boundary object’ which raises interpretative questions for both. By analysing butch imagery in lesbian photography of the 1990s, this paper rehistoricises how Feminist Art History and Trans Studies were consolidated from a mutual exclusivity, occurring on the grounds of masculinity’s difficult place in feminist gender politics. By situating (trans)masculinity in Feminist Art History, I test the taxonomies of both Feminism and Trans Studies. Feminist Art History after Trans Studies not only revises the ‘proper object’ of feminism, but introduces the question of sexual difference to think gendered asymmetries within the undifferentiated umbrella of ‘trans.’

Catherine Grant, Courtauld Institute of Art

Changing Questions, Changing Answers

Feminism is a set of politics that has a particular relationship to questions. To answer the question ‘What is feminist art history now?’, we could think about Linda Nochlin’s formulation of an ‘ ad hoc methodology’ and how this helped her answer a famous question. When teaching about feminism and art, I’ve often been asked ‘What is feminism?’ It took a long time to find the right answer, and now I realise that the crucial point is that the question wasn’t also about the status of artworks within this conversation. In thinking of the questions asked in feminism and feminist art history, the ones that engage me, as well as many other scholars, circulate around this: ‘What is needed to create community?’ This question requires an exploration of the interdisciplinary possibilities for writing feminist art histories that are attentive to groups, organisations, and publications, both in and outside the gallery. It also requires a consideration of what is needed in our particular moment, what can be taken (or discarded) from previous ones, and what our responsibilities are in the present. For myself, this has involved thinking through the deceptive simplicity of consciousness-raising, with its basis in asking questions and listening attentively and politically to answers, and articulating its relationship to expanded feminist artistic practices, organising and imagining since the 1970s (as well as Nochlin’s ad hoc methodology). This paper will explore how we can stay attentive to changing questions and answers, including listening to questions left by artists and feminists across the decades.